This is very sad news; a huge number of talented people worked there over the years — Susan Orlean, Joe Klein, Sidney Blumenthal, Janet Maslin, David Denby, Ellen Barry, Tom Scocca, Dan Kennedy, Gareth Cook, Charlie Pierce, Kristen Lombardi; the list could go on — and the Phoenix was an important part of the Boston media ecosystem. (With the Globe up for sale and the Herald in decline, that ecosystem isn’t in the best shape these days.) Others can write better reminiscences of its glory days than I can, but I did want to note one element of interest to the broader print newspaper universe.

Last fall, the Phoenix merged with a sister Boston glossy magazine and switched from being printed on traditional newsprint like this:

to a glossy weekly that looked like this:

(To be fair, there were many redesigns between 1983 and 2012. I just wanted to show Randy Newman on the cover.)

The goal of the move was to reignite interest from national advertisers by becoming more magazine-like and improving the quality of the print experience. That’s a move that gets talked about with some frequency among newspapers (dailies, too), and the Phoenix closing adds another data point that it doesn’t work.

In 2010, we wrote about the San Francisco Chronicle, which had made a similar investment in high-gloss paper to try to be more appealing to advertisers. Did it work? Here’s Chronicle president Mark Adkins at the time: “I don’t think so…It’s not a good tactical move for other papers…On the ad side, advertisers have not responded to it at all.”

Likewise, the Phoenix saw a temporary rise in national advertisers with its redesign last fall, but that quickly subsided, and that lack of national ad revenue was cited as the proximate cause of yesterday’s announcement.

A shift upmarket in print has long been seen as one potential move for dailies, often in conjunction with cutting print days. (A major metro might decide to cut from seven days a week to three, but make those three days closer to a glossy city magazine in format and form, the idea goes, drawing in some new advertisers and producing a better product that takes advantage of print while letting the web do what the web does best.)

Look, there are bigger factors at play here — alt weeklies, like their rival dailies, thrived in an environment of limited publishing choice, when both readers and advertisers had fewer options available to them. The model is in varying degrees of trouble everywhere, no matter what kind of paper stock they’re using. But the Phoenix’s closing hints that, for advertisers, the issue is less newsprint vs. glossy and more print vs. digital.